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Recent Scientific Accomplishments Wiersema’s research centers on improving the amount and quality of data used to study violence, particularly the measurement of violent death and injury characteristics. Recently, Wiersema established the Maryland Violent Death Reporting System (MVDRS) in the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The MVDRS is a public health surveillance system that monitors the incidence and detailed characteristics of violent death (homicides, suicides, and deaths of undetermined manner) statewide by linking every available official record, including police, medical examiner, crime lab, and death certificate data, at the individual level (Serpi, Wiersema, Hackman et al. 2005). This effort has led to research that focuses on undercoverage, nonresponse and other sources of error in this and other mortality data systems (Breiding & Wiersema, forthcoming; Loftin, Wiersema, McDowall & Dobrin, 2003; Wiersema 2004). In addition to enhancing mortality data available for research, Wiersema has also made important contributions toward developing other data for population research. Currently he has secured funding to document restricted-use National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) data that allows linkage with other areal Census data (Wiersema 1999). The result of this work will re-enable an active program of research by more than a dozen scholars that was suspended by the Census Bureau in 2002 due to lack of funding (Wiersema 2005). Wiersema was the lead author of a successful five-year, proposal to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to establish the MVDRS in Maryland’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. MVDRS, a part of the National Violent Death Reporting System, synthesizes and standardizes existing official data on violence-related deaths and injuries in Maryland with similar efforts across the country. Now that this data collection effort has been institutionalized, Wiersema has turned his attention toward seeking funds to support additional analysis of the data. He has been supported through a small grant from the American Statistical Association’s Committee on Law and Justice Statistics to develop data resources associated with the area-identified NCVS. He has also been supported by the NIDA-funded National Criminal Justice Treatment Practices surveys for which he serves as sampling designer and survey methodologist. Wiersema’s future research will build on his interests in measurement of violence. Using MVDRS data, Wiersema and Breiding are exploring the circumstances and quality of evidence that lead to police and medical examiner inferences about intentionality of harm. A research proposal on the effect of evidence quality on criminal justice outcomes has been submitted to the National Institute of Justice. Wiersema’s work on the area-identified NCVS will lead to several new cross-disciplinary research proposals. The first will focus on small-area estimation that takes advantage of his access to the data in the Census Bureau’s Research Data Centers and survey statistician T.E. Raghunathan's expertise in modeling missing data (Raghunathan and Wiersema, 2001). Support will also be sought to complete other area-identified NCVS projects currently in working paper stage, including a study of violence among residents of public and non-public housing (Wiersema & Blumstein, 2000) and a study of contextual effects on domestic violence (Lynch & Wiersema, 2000). | ||||||||
Maryland Population Research Center
0124N Cole Student Activities Building (#162)
College Park, MD 20742
Phone: 301-405-6403
Fax: 301-405-5743